How Do We Think? Pictures and Words

Think about these two very different sentences:

1. The bulbous blue hippopotamus, reeking from the odour of stale fishy brine, waddled into the room and plopped onto the floor with a self‑satisfied grin spreading over its face.

2. Our nation was conceived in a spirit of unity for all time, freedom from persecution, equality for the populace, and justice unequivocable.

After reading the first sentence, could you just "see" the hippo walking through the room? Were you almost disgusted at the fish odour? Could you "feel" the vibrations when the hippo plopped to the floor? Flow about the second sentence, could you "see" unity? Freedom? Justice? How do we represent information in our minds? Do we think in pictures as the sentence about the blue hippo illustrates, the answer seems to be yes. But most of us probably didn't call to mind any mental pictures when we read about the abstract concepts of justice and equality, yet we still understood what was being said.

There is some controversy over how information is represented in our minds. Some experts believe we encode information about real objects and events into mental representations of those objects and events. When we think, we mentally manipulate these mental images. Others believe that we encode information in terms of verbal descriptions called propositions and that mental images are sometimes added to the propositions after they are retrieved from memory.

A proposition is defined as the smallest unit of knowledge that can be validated as true or false. Even though propositions are really abstract cognitive events, most propositional theories depict them as short sentences, such as "Clinton is president." John Anderson has proposed a theory called adaptive control of thought (ACT) based on propositions. Anderson envisions propositions at the nodes of a net with all strands of the net leading to propositions. In this way, all thought processes are made up of propositions or combinations of propositions. Allan Paivio has combined mental images and verbal images (propositions) into a theory of cognitive processing known as the dual-coding hypothesis.